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I see the on track action at Leicester press and practice has been cancelled due to the new section of the track not being settled correctly. So just photos and meet the rider section later in the day

Sorry guys I forget about the new average conversion I was looking at his 2016 finishing average, Anyway looks like it has to a British rider so my guess will be Joe Jacobs

If Poole could get him to ride a good option would be Szymon Wozniak as knows all the tracks and had a similar average to Newman last year.

The late change in the team is due to Lebedevs informing the club that he would not be there for the opening meeting and for Somerset as he was required in Poland and also that Wroclaw have said that he will need to practice on Saturdays to be considered for the team until he can prove his form. I am very disappointed that he is not coming as think he would have been exciting and a good signing. Wolbert was just unlucky that the average fitted to make the change, he had also informed the club after signing that he would be doing GP and SEC Qualifying so likely to be some clashes too I also understand that the meetings that King and Bates misses will see good guests being used including some former Lions being Klindt,Paddy H,Lasse,Ludvig

Lebdevs has a number of continental commitments and has now declared he will be doing all the Euro and GP qualifying rounds so more clashes during the season. Also I believe that the club were worried about relations with Wroclaw his Polish club who now have priority on him and has to be remembered what they did with Wozniak last year suddenly just withdrew his start permits for UK

The Netball Coverage is part funded by the governing body and they have a very good sponsor in Vitality who all help to keep Netball on Sky Sports if not i suspect that they would have been in a similar position to Speedway.

OveFundinFan- Sky did not pull out last week this was done a couple of months ago and was first discussed with BSPA at end of last season. There is no technical reason that i can foresee in my experience that would need to postpone the first meeting until June

CookieIpswich- Is that a confirmed list of meetings ? I am quite surprised that they would show both the relegation/promotion meetings and also that would show both sets of semifinals. I thought they may have just chosen the one to broadcast. So far it's all looking good and I await for the confirmation of who the commentators will be I am expecting Kelvin and an other with Natalie doing the presentation

PhilipRising- The conversations I had last week at trade show with some of the BT sports guys and a few equipment vendors was that the OB side of things had been sorted and contracted to Timeline OB who did British GP and World Cup for BSI & BT last year. They have a new unit called RF1 which is a combined 12 camera production unit and Uplink all in one unit which makes it easier to rig and keeps costs down which would be ideal for what is required now. It may be that things have changed around again as they do frequently in this industry especially if costings can be reduced. As you have said I am sure that once the BT team have everything confirmed and the first couple of meetings sorted they will do some official launch. The main thing is that British Speedway is still on tv this year

Can't go into the finer details of the contract and to be honest do not know all the ins and outs as rights acquisitions is not my area. So don't know what deal BSPA have got from this But some simples maths it costs around £35,000 a meeting to produce multiplied by 23-25 meetings and then compare to money that clubs received for having Sky in attendance to compensate for the stay at home fans. Again multiply against meetings televised you will see by not broadcasting massive savings over 500k saved

Wow 19th June is a very late to start the TV coverage things must have changed since last week as I was told planned to start on 01/05 at Poole vs Swindon. It looks like BT want to get CL & Europa league football finished before starting with Speedway

Well finally the BSPA have confirmed this for everyone, This is not something that has come out of the blue Sky sports firstly made Go Speed and BSPA aware at the end of last season that they were unlikely to broadcast Speedway in 2017 unless they could find a sponsor to help support the production costs. Each Speedway meeting costs around 38k to get on air and if the weather is poor you could end up with no live content, that is a risk that has always been known but previously the excitement and the money available for fringe sports was more readily available. Unfortunately due to the rising costs of securing Premiership football,F1 and a strong need to keep Championship football and ECB & 20-20 Cricket some lower level sports like Speedway have to miss out of they are unable to get sponsors to help with the production costs. Netball and Greyhound racing have been put in the same position but have been able to find a sponsor to help. The move to BT sport is a good one for fans and I am sure the team will do a good job in producing some top quality action which some I am informed will be in 4K they are planning on using 8-10 cameras which is a couple less than the 12 that Sky used but may possibly add to this if they feel they need too. I don't believe that this is the end of Speedway on Sky sports as there are a couple of technical developments happening in the next 12-18 months with Remote production which will that you will literally just have the camera operators at the track and will all plug into one small unit on wheels that fits in back of a car. This unit is them connected to a good quality internet connection and broadcast like this. So all the replays,graphics,vision mixing,camera racking and directing will be done from Sky HQ meaning that you will not need the big HD OB units,satellite uplink trucks,generator trucks,graphics van or provide hot 3 course meal for 25-30 staff. so this in turn will bring the production costs right down to around 5K a meeting which is a lot more manageable. The technology is there now but needs a bit of time to mature first and also for UK internet speeds to rise in some areas. Interestingly the Sky Executive producer of Speedway is very much interested in this area and did actually do quite a few technical trials for us in January

One that has to be remembered in broadcasting things can change very quickly. One minute you think that you are going on one direction and then another factor can happen which changes the direction that you were previously working on. Only last week I thought that we was going to be using some specific technology for the upcoming Cricket season I had researched the product at length wrote up my findings ,Negotiated the pricing and agreed the dates. For then two days later being told change of plan we want to do it this way instead. That's just the nature of media and Broadcasting

As I posted originally all I can confirm at present is that British Speedway will be on TV in 2017 and that there will be some improvements to the coverage and the viewers experience. Taking off my business hat and as a loyal Speedway fan this is the most important thing that fans can watch Speedway on TV with subscription to the required channels. On a side note I have been told and have read articles about how BT Sport will be making improvements to their GP coverage with more presentation and interviews being done from the track. They have just contracted Timeline OB to use their new combined 4K uplink & OB unit to provide the facilities for this.

Skidder1- You are partly right commentators are freelance but there is a contractual stipulation that if you accept work for Sky sports that you don't work for a couple of competitors as well.

Going back to my previous comments on Wednesday I obviously cannot disclose what was discussed but was very interesting and shall we say the sports promoters need to take a hard look at modern methods and growing the sport so that larger crowds attend and then can hopefully convince more GP stars into the league. I do know one thing and am happy to share this that one thing in the past that has annoyed the high level team at Sky was attendances at tv meetings. I have been at Speedway meetings where Sky sports previous MD and CEO Barney Francis and Darren Long they have both asked why there are not more fans in the stadium and why there was no offers or extra things on like flags,balloons, Clappers The promotors have previously always been reimbursed financially when it's been a TV meeting but most do not do any offers or promotions for fans to attend. This was suggested to BSPA & Go Speed numerous times but instead promotors just wanted to pocket the money as profit. Also suggestions were made at getting an agency involved to get every tv match sponsored by local business and then we would give them the exposure with increased focus on their banners and involvement in coin toss etc but the BSPA didn't want to pay the fees When a few clubs did try offers like Leicester,Lakeside,Swindon and Birmingham they were generally rewarded with large crowds compared to other tv meetings so proof the concept works. A weekly magazine type show has been considered previously and was even fully costed out but in the end it was deemed to be too expensive for amount of viewers it would attract and also at that point there was only two companies that produce Speedway DVDS that could have provided footage at the required standard so would have meant getting more independent companies in to do some tracks. I can't remember full costs but do remember it was going to be over £1200 a meeting just for maybe 8 mins of footage then you had editing, on screen talent, studio time so quite expensive to produce. On a positive note at least there will be British Speedway on tv in 2017 and have already heard some good things about the coverage

I have a day out of the office at a broadcast expo show in London and one of the first people I bump into was Sky Sports Speedway executive producer he had some very interesting things to say about British Speedway and how it should move forward

Sky are quite strict about people that they offer work to do not take work on with BT sport in particular. This applies across the board from Camera crew,Vision engineering staff and even more so with on screen talent. Although I am not 100% sure on the facts I believe that Nigel & Kelvin had to get high up clearance at board level to get the ok to do the GP comms when it moved to BT and at one point BT may have got their own comms team in.

This is rather difficult for me to post much at the moment but hopefully in the next couple of days everything will become clear. I will update further on my personal thoughts then. The general production on Sky Sports cutbacks have been happening across the board right from Football with the EFL final not being in UHD,Two less cameras on PL Darts,More Sky sports news live inserts done using mobile technology rather than satellite uplink trucks and less Wireless cameras for Cricket. So hopefully many can now see this not related to viewing figures,Speedway has always performed well with viewing share especially considered it's often up against the soaps and sometimes Football on Sky & BT. It always has been on par with sports of similar interests and some with much larger crowds I did post the full average figures in a previous post a couple of weeks ago I think it was about 70 odd thousand over the year as some weeks were very good. This data comes direct from All Sky users that box has a Broadband connection the system is clever and very detailed like was it paused,were the ads watched and even has this person watched before. This is much more detailed rather than the limited BARB panel so Sky data is much more accurate and can also see how much time shifted viewing is done e.g Recorded and watched later and also takes into account on demand/Catch up viewers Where Speedway does have a problem is that during live coverage advertisements just don't sell apart from to BSI for GP ads there are no brands that say want to buy ad space during Speedway coverage and most ads shown are just part of bigger package like Ford have guaranteed 30 mins during course of the day.

The most important thing for viewers is that Speedway fans will be able to watch UK Speedway on TV in 2017. There may not be as many meetings as before but something is better than nothing and some viewers with 4K televisions will get to see Speedway in Ultra HD

Glyn will there be a chance to get a big road blade on the track to level it all out ? I know quite a few riders over the last couple of years have suggested getting this done to make the base more consistent and level as well as making the home straight less downhill out of last bend. Hopefully the new promotion can make this happen as well as the shape changes

I am very glad to see the track changes are finally happening hopefully that Glyn will be allowed to do what he wants with the changes to try and provide the best track possible for racing. This should get fans back in watching if the racing is better and will answer some of the critics on here who blame the track for lack of entertainment. All I keep hearing from the new promotion is positive things and understand that they have plans to make more changes to give fans better entertainment and value for money

I have been meaning to reply to this thread for a few days even when as far as getting the stats from the insight team. But have been very busy at work with a couple of projects and a couple of technical hurdles thrown in by FOM in preparation for the new season look out for the UHD coverage it is very impressive. Anyway in 2016 over the whole season the average viewership for EL Speedway on Sky was 84,650 with unsurprisingly the play offs being a lot higher than that with peaks of 109,000 for the first leg of semi finals. The finals did even better pushing close to 116,000 these figures are very good considering the size of support at tracks and proves there are lots of armchair fans watching too. Speedway does perform very well when considered against other sports and regularly gets higher figures than Pro 12 Rugby,Superleague and some Cricket coverage One of the problems for Speedway future on TV this is on both Sky & BT is that advertisers are not keen to purchase space during Speedway coverage, most ads shown are just inserted as part of a bigger package which financially makes it difficult to balance the rights & broadcast costs against revenue incoming. Another interesting fact is that Speedway viewers do a lot of time shifted viewing they tend to keep meetings stored on their boxes for quite a long period of time and then watch them back sometimes months later. As is quite common knowledge now this financial year there has had to be some cutbacks made on outside broadcasts due to increases in purchasing broadcast rights. Some of these examples can be seen on PL darts coverage where two cameras have been changed for robotics remote cameras which in my opinion are still not at the level as beingbale to replace a manned camera and also on Superleague the amount of cameras being used and also the amount of graphics that can be used.

The problem I can see with Lebedevs is other European commitments as I am sure that he will be doing the Euro individual qualification rounds and maybe the finals,Then GP qualifying rounds and then add in possibly the One Sport pairs series which all of the above take place on non GP weekends when of course is when Leicester have their meetings The rest of team looks ok without being anything to write home about it is Auty and Wolbert that I have concerns over as think they may struggle

The next Leicester signing in my opinion is the most crucial on what type of season the club has based upon who has already signed. If what I have heard tonight turns out to be correct it will be a very positive signing and I wonder if it will mean that the Speedway forums man of many names e.g. KKS,Morriseyfan,MJJ fan will be making regular visits to Beaumont Park in 2017 in fact maybe this poster could confirm whether the rider in question is coming to Leicester .